News

Somerset, NJ, October 5, 1999 . . . Gardners Books, Britain’s leading wholesaler, and PubEasy.com, the global Internet inquiry and ordering service, announced today the launch of the Gardners/PubEasy.com website at http://pubeasy.books.gardners.com. The site is available to all booksellers with a PubEasy.com password and provides access to Gardners for title, price and availability checks, to place orders and to track the status of orders on a 24 hour, 7 day per week basis over the Internet.

Gardners Books, located in Eastbourne, England maintains a physical stock holding of over 210,000 titles from 1,700 UK based publishers and imprints. These titles are dispatched on the same day the order is received. Booksellers in the UK receive titles the next day and overseas orders are sent to international shippers within 24 hours of order placement. In addition, Gardners offers a Special Order Service supplying any British, American or German title in print (approximately 2.5 million titles), which Gardners will ship to booksellers anywhere in the world.

Booksellers who search on the PubEasy.com/Whitaker bibliographic website will now see daily updated title information held in stock at Gardners with links for Teleordering or a link to the Gardners/PubEasy.com website for direct ordering and order tracking.

"Gardners Books is committed to embracing state of the art systems and technologies for the use of our customers. PubEasy.com has made excellent progress establishing its Internet service, which connects booksellers and suppliers over the Internet. We think it’s an important place to be," said Bob Jackson, Commercial Director of Gardners.

"The launch of Gardners’ PubEasy.com website is a significant and exciting step forward," said Peter F. Clifton, Chief Executive Officer of PubEasy.com. "PubEasy.com offers bookstores direct access to an increasing majority of publishers and distributors and now access to one of the UK's leading wholesalers. The significance of Gardners joining PubEasy.com is tremendous for booksellers anywhere in the world who may want to source books directly from a leading wholesaler."

PubEasy.com, the Internet inquiry and ordering service represents the new standard in e-commerce for the global bookselling industry. More than 1,300 booksellers from over 52 countries spanning the UK, Europe, North America and Asia are using the service to access title, price and availability information, to place orders, to check the status of their orders and to access catalogs from participating publishers, distributors and wholesalers. Booksellers with a PubEasy.com password can directly access any participating Affiliate website on the network or the Whitaker UK bibliographic site.

The service is free to booksellers and is available via the Internet 24 hours a day, 7-days a week.

Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Marston Book Services, Exel Logistics, Bookpoint (Hodder Headline), TBS/Grantham Book Services and J. Whitaker & Sons provided early support and endorsement of PubEasy.com. Participation from the bookselling industry continues to grow, with recent Affiliate sites launched by Gardners Books, Penguin UK, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and Littlehampton Book Services. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. and Airlift Book Company are scheduled to launch PubEasy.com websites over the coming months.

US Affiliate websites scheduled to launch include: Broadman & Holman, Von Holtzbrinck Publishing Services (Henry Holt, St. Martin's Press and Farrar Straus & Giroux) and National Book Network (the second largest US book distributor).

To access PubEasy.com, booksellers require a password, a computer with a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.

PubEasy.com^TM is a registered trademark of VISTA Computer Services
PubEasy.com is a subsidiary of VISTA Computer Services

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